Reading Time: 5 minutes Little did I know that I was carrying a time bomb in my back pocket. It’s a Huawei P9, a smart little phone (forgive the pun!) whose makers have the potential to cause a lot of us a lot of trouble. Gone are the days when we had to phone the local butcher to make […]
Science
A Pi In The Sky – 3.14 And A Few More Decimals
Reading Time: 3 minutes I was never much good at maths. In fact, to this day, I will never come to terms with 10 minutes of nightmare that I went through during a maths test. I was about 10 at the time, but I remember every single moment of having to admit to the whole class that I was […]
- Biology
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How To Destroy A Human Brain
Reading Time: 2 minutes It’s a story I missed, but having now seen it, I cannot leave it untouched. It represents, on its own, all that is magnificent and evil about human existence – the magnificence of giving life to another, and the evil of taking part of that same life away. In November last year, a French court […]
Communicating Beyond Beauty (1) – The Whale Song
Reading Time: 2 minutes What if you could write a love song for a whale, and an orchestra went out into the ocean to play it? As you listen, you can see the spectrogram of a beautiful humpback whale song from deep in the Monterey Bay. These […]
- Brexit
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“Foreigners Go” – The Settled Status App For EU Citizens
Reading Time: 4 minutes If ever you have wanted to play an online game that put your whole future at risk, now’s your chance. If you are an EU citizen living in the UK, just download the government’s “settled status” app, as soon as it becomes available, and start playing. The fact that the government insists that the application […]
- Satire
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If There’s Life Without Facebook, Send Me The Link!
Reading Time: 4 minutes It’s one minute to midnight and we are entering the last day of the year. Forget about Brexit, Trump, and violent men with yellow vests. Forget about the fact that we haven’t had a white Christmas for ages, and that the Japanese are hell-bent in chasing sharks. This time of year […]
- Psychology
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The Case Against Evolutionary Psychology – When Science Forgets Morality
Reading Time: 6 minutes I’ve had a brief encounter with the world of evolutionary psychology, by posting my last piece in a Facebook group baring the same name. It was accepted by a moderator but not, it seems, by the group’s members. Maybe they didn’t like the way I criticized psychologists. I was accused of submitting a blog post […]
- Culture
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One “D” Or Two? – Bilingualism And “Le Brain”
Reading Time: 7 minutes Bilingualism isn’t all fun, I’m afraid. There are certain words in English that I loathe, and there are certain words in French that I hate, when I’m forced to spell them. I still haven’t found a way of remembering that the French word “adresse” and English word “address” are spelt differently whilst, apparently, meaning the same thing. […]
Climate Change: Run Rabbit, Run – Run From The Sun
Reading Time: 5 minutes Yes, I know. Before you start accusing me of going all “ecological”, I am aware that the last “dreadful” summer we had, was back in 1976. Since those golden days, we have had widespread floods in Europe, a tornado in London’s Kensal Green, an erupting volcano in Iceland, earthquakes in Italy, no white Christmas for […]
Heat And The Willows – Stressing Your Local Oak Tree
Reading Time: 4 minutes And just as the Brits thought that, after Brexit, cooperation with the EU over the environment didn’t concern them anymore. With temperatures soaring in the high thirties, forest fires raging left, right, and centre, this is really not the time to start acting as a bully in the classroom. It’s time to forget about perceived […]